The Hemisphere: The Odor of Sin

At his summer home 15 miles north of Ottawa, the late Prime Minister
Mackenzie King used to walk visitors to the boundary of his property
and point toward the misty, blue-green hills to the north. "Beyond this
point," he would say, "there is nothing but the North Pole."

King was not quite accurate. The hills and valleys flanking Quebec's
swift Gatineau River teem with habitations and inhabitants: logging
camps and old farm villages, hunting lodges of U.S. and Canadian
sportsmen, mountaineers living in ancestral log cabins, remnants of the
Algonquin and Tètes de Boule...